HN user

shadowprofile76

90 karma
Posts1
Comments39
View on HN

Please do define how Bitcoin or Ethereum (among others) are "pyramid schemes". Cryptocurrencies have indeed been used for pyramid schemes by specific actors, but then again so has normal money, and many other things. Numerous people on this site who presumably have the intellectual faculties to know better toss that little qualification out from their mouths almost reflexively out of emotional crypto-hate, but have apparently never even read a basic encyclopedia definition of pyramid scheme structure.

I'd suggest everyone step back from their own politics for a moment and pause to consider just how absurd it is that a fucking medicine for parasite infections that barely anyone except veterinarians, tropical explorers, pet owners and farmers knew previously has now been polliticized to this degree across vast swathes of the media landscape.

The obvious answer to such a situation is that science should be allowed to take its normal investigative course and all possible options be investigated and presented so long as the researchers behind them are also honestly examining evidence. And yes, this could very easily include ivermectin or anything else, because it already does in much of the world where this polarization bubble around this particular medicine, or certain other subjects, doesn't ridiculously exist to the same degree.

I shake my head thinking about people a few decades from now shaking their own heads at emotionally and ideologically driven stupidities like this in the middle of numerous other hysterias revolving around a global pandemic and the politics of the last few years..

The fourth amendment gives you that right (despite it having been badly mutilated by all sorts of supposedly valid or forced exceptions (ie: border areas). You're supposed to be secure in your possessions and property. The legal breakdown is here, https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re... and definitely doesn't allow cops to arbitrarily rifle through your car looking for evidence of suspicious things. They are supposed to have prior and clear cause for probable illegal activity (note that being suspected of having cash is not an illegal actiity), though probable cause can be stretched to include a lot of things by a sympathetic judge and corrupt cops.

And I suppose you yourself are not at all a self appoiunted internet expert with your broad and highly charged range of opinions without a single clear cut reference backing any of them up?

Worth noting as well is that you're trying to assert a negative without evidence-based substance as part of your particularly alarmist discourse. In effect: We don't know that COVID doesn't cause X list of aweful long term things I just mentioned, though no evidence so far indicates that it does, we should just assume it does however in order to push for a bunch of harsh and punitive measures against those with any skeptical take.

As an expat from Canada living in Latin America and using a number of services from both regions, I've had similar probems, also these same problems with other services from specific countries outside of where I live that I need to use due to work.

Overall, this general location-obsessed balkanization of online servicces, websites and pages has become ridiculous. A great number of tech companies and websites, in ther fixation of "giving users a more localized, personalized experience" (in part mostly just tracking the shit out of them obsessively) have actually done more to break the ease of using the internet as a traveler and in ways that are ironic as helll when one considers the supposed ideals of an internet that was supposed to help more people become MORE global in their access to media, content and services regardless of where they reside or travel to.

What we're seeing is an absurd, almost fuedalized regression of what should and easily could be fully delocalized platforms, which ruins them in the name of supposedly making them better. It's tedious, annoying and increasingly common.

That this has been normalized is grotesque. That the focus has shifted to mere cases, even in small numbers as a justification for draconian, personal freedom-ignoring lockdowns in this paranoid, absurdly overreaching way is not something that any normal person should applaud or defend. Simply imagine the extrapolation of these tendencies moving forward into the future, for any government anywhere, using lockdowns as a justification for all sorts of things and always using the "somebody think of the children"-like argument of, "but if it ambiguously saves even one life, it's justified".

This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn't. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated."

How I laughed out loud... Gold

I just recently bought a Lenovo for someone close to me. Would you mind elaborating on why you say this about them, and if you really think they can be made somewhat privacy-safe for general use?

One major problem with sites like the skeptical Enquirer is that they exist to serve their main purpose -to be skeptical. This by itself is fine to an extent and much of their content can and does legitimately debunk nonsensical and unfounded claims. But when your main purpose is skepticism, it can become self serving to the point that you cherry pick arguments, evidence, cases and lots of other things in order to always ensure that a known explanation can be found no matter what, even if it has to be stretched thin. Unknown things do happen, forcing them to conform to a certain easy bracket of the known is its own type of irrationality.

It's a non-fiction book pretty much through and through. The author writes with an eye for entertaining narrative and thus you could assume that small parts are embellished a bit for this reason but overall I haven't seen any criticism of the book that claims anything remotely important to be fictional. Martha Dodd (the ambassador's daughter) comes across as particularly foolish. First because she tries to defend the Nazi regime to her friends and then when a bit of light finally dawns on her about its nature, switches over to becoming a useful idiot for the equally vicious soviet regime, working as an NKVD informatn/agent. And based on third party accounts and the old NKVD documents from her informant file, describing her as a useful idiot (stealing a phrase from Lenin) doesn't seem to be far off the mark. One soviet handler's description of her is rather amusing: "She considers herself a Communist and claims to accept the party's program. In reality she is a typical representative of American bohemia, a sexually decayed woman ready to sleep with any handsome man."

Dodd herself met Hitler once through an introduction by a man who at the time was a close friend of the dictator, and her description of him was that he was "excessively gentle and modest in his manners"... Indeed...

You know exactly what it means and maybe you're moving into semantic disagreement. Google does not sell the raw user information itself to its paying customers but it does sell it indirectly by giving them access to excellent targeting tools based on all those things it knows about you, me and X and Y individuals. Maybe im not being perfectly precise but to me that fits the bill for buying information indirectly.

I would add Nazi Germany to that little list. Their declaration of war on the United States in December of 1941 was flatly suicidal (already fighting Russia where they had lost the initiative, and already in a two front European war due to the continued presence of England) But declare war they did anyhow and not only was the Third Reich dismantled, it was flat out devastated and incinerated with several million deaths. Germany suffered the second highest death toll of any country in the European theater of war, and all this was allowed to suicidally happen despite every single one of Hitler's generals and most of the top Nazi party bosses completely knowing that their leader's decision in late 1941 was guaranteed to destroy them. They just went along with it though.

Churchill rather typically stated it most succinctly: When presented in late 1941 with the report of Hitlers declaration of War on the U.S he said (paraphrasing a bit from memory on the literature) "So then we do win this war after all.."

As for Japan, SOME of the top people in the government and military knew they were committing slow suicide with their attack (Yamamoto for example, thought it was complete idiocy to fight the U.S) but there were enough fanatical believers to push through their idea that if they could just get the upper hand on the U.S in a preemptive naval/air war in 1942, they might secure peace for their Asian conquests.

I don't get why this was downvoted, except perhaps out of a silly emotional reaction. You just summed up the essence of what a large percentage of the whole comment thread for this link explains in detail in different ways. Many rich people got rich by creating growing value for others with their capital assets and they continue to do so by doing more of the same. What they "hoard" is being deployed in the economy in crucially productive ways that benefit thousands or even millions of others. Not all cases but plenty of them fit this profile among the extremely rich.

Exactly and the simple reason why, which keeps these basic economics of bribery working so robustly, is the asymmetric measures of value/cost inherent to the two sides of the equation. A government or facebook employee or whomever who has access to some lever worth a great deal will sell access to it for these fairly small sums exactly because the much greater value isn't actually a cost to them. They're leveraging their access to someone elses resources for personal acquisition of a much smaller but to them worthwhile gain. You'd never convince a billionaire to sell you access to something of theirs worth billions by paying them only millions, but, like you said, you can easily convince a senator to give you access to billions in government resources (tax money) for a few million to their personal campaign.

Sincere thanks for the followup. Interesting points to consider. I'll have to look into products/providers more. Any general sources you'd recommend?

I am not referring to government robbing money in a crassly criminal/corrupt sense. My point was in reference to the government simply spending poorly the money it legitimately takes through legally sanctioned means (taxes), but then crying about budget problems despite this. I repeat, government size, reach and government spending are all at nearly record levels in most western states, despite this the focus keeps being placed on companies avoiding taxes instead of government reallocating its existing funds better. This is not simple whataboutism either, It's a point that's directly relevant to the arguments around to what degree companies should be allowed to avoid their perceived tax obligations.

Furthermore, you mention preferring having money robbed from you by someone in government than by some rich dude you never saw in your life. What's the difference? Since I assume your definition of theft is about actual stealing by either party, then in either case, someone you don't know is taking money you could have had access to for their personal benefit. Except that in the corporate case, the person in question is not even actually stealing from you, they're keeping more of something they first earned through sales. The corrupt government thief however literally takes from what was first taken from you by taxation.

But the competition must be ferocious for such generic things, which is why Im so surprised by these profit margins. I don't mean to pry with too many questions but are these the sort of sales and margins created even by sales of more or less generic products or do these people put heavy effort into positioning themselves differently?

Most governments already have plenty of money that they take in from various taxes, in many cases government tax collection is at record levels and government size (both fiscally and in terms of raw personnel and asset bloat) is definitely greater than at any time in modern history for most western states. At what point does the discussion turn to asking governments to you know, actually prioritize and allocate their spending better? Considering just how much they waste on the simple inertial task of keeping all their perpetually active very often useless things alive. We could list so many examples of huge resource waste by governments, but no no, let's blame Apple et al for "hoarding". I fail to see how any thinking person could first pin the blaim on Apple and other companies for "poor working SOBs getting robbed" Those SOBs are already getting robbed but mainly by government, which literally takes money from them and still keeps their services shitty under bullshit justifications like "not enough funding", unlike Apple, that's mainly holding onto more of money it actually earned by selling things customers wanted.

I'm surprised didn't expect those figures for Amazon sellers, sort of seems like a saturated marketplace with razor margins for most sales. Would you be willing to share a bit more detail on what kinds of things these fairly successful Amazon sellers you know of sell on the site?

Here you're arguing nonsense. Venezuela does not have a functional democracy under the Maduro government and the declaration of Guaido as interim president was absolutely an internal constitutional matter. The National Assembly (the equivalent of the U.S House of representatives basically) of the country, which is the only legislative body in the government where anything like a legitimate political opposition exists, declared Guaido interim president under Article 233 of the country's legal constitution, until a fully supervised and open election could be held due to the grossly rigged nature of the most recent Maduro victory, which had itself been approved by Maduro's own party-loyal replacement to the National Assembly, this replacement being called the "National Constituent Assembly". Maduro had originally disavowed the National Assembly in 2017 in favor of his specially created Constituent National Assembly because the legitimate National Assembly wouldn't allow him to replace the standing constitution of Venezuela with a new one that allowed him to stay in power indefinitely.

And you call this shit show an advanced election system?

Imagine if Trump tried to replace the U.S constitution, had this blocked by the House, then disavowed and replaced the House with his own special congress of purely loyal republicans, then had a rigged election to make himself president a third time, with the majority of the original, real U.S House declaring him illegitimate as a result, causing him to then declare them liberal-sponsored meddlers and further try to marginalize them.. Well, sort of the same thing in effect, but because the Maduro government is leftist, somehow this is considered perfectly alright and democratic by far too many people...

Interestingly, from what I've read, the social stigma around Herpes type 2 (the genital version) is a fairly modern thing. Before the late 1970's it seems that little distinction was made between the genital and facial variants of the disease and both were socially lumped together without one being given much moral stigma as a venereal disease. It was more in the 70's and 80's that media and pharmaceutical interests basically drew attention to the difference so that a sexual hysteria could be created around the genital variant of the virus, apparently in a way that improved antiviral drug sales.